"With all of the BSD variants available for download, it's easy to incorrectly assume all of them are pure, incompatible forks from each other. Actually, there are more shades of BSD out in the world than just separate forks. One in particular made the news a couple of weeks ago when it was commercially acquired. The BSD in question is PC-BSD. The company that bought it is iXsystems, a systems deployment and integrator firm out of San Jose that has pretty strong experience implementing *BSD, Unix and Linux systems for its customer base. So, why did the company up and buy PC-BSD?"

> So BSD won't be the "next Linux". If BSD gets more
> used, it'll continue to be gnome, kde, X.org, apache,
> gcc, mysql. I don't think it matters at all wheter the
> kernel is Linux or BSD or Solaris, or even Haiku. It'll
> continue being FOSS with just another name.

Correction: It'll continue being FOSS *UNIX* with just another name (and kernel). Many FOSS OSes aren't UNIX-centered and don't use gnome, kde, X.org, apache, gcc, and mysql.